The handling of articles having a substantially tapered shape for example in form of a cup or a small pot is known in the field of cartoning machines. Examples of such articles are yogurt pots, small cups for food or non-food products, coffee capsules. These articles are well known both in the food and non-food industry; their use has considerably increased over the last years having been boosted especially by the continuously growing use of coffee capsules.
A machine for secondary packaging of said articles according to the prior art comprises one or several robots or manipulators which load the articles into carton boxes or cases according to a predefined pattern. The robot or manipulator works with a preset cycle between a station for the arrival of the articles and a delivery station. The articles are supplied to the arrival station for example on one or more tracks or conveyors. The delivery station may coincide with the insertion of the articles into boxes or cases.
Tapered articles are generally arranged alternating an upright article with an article overturned by 180 degrees to save space. Such arrangement is known as nesting of the articles and allows optimal use of space within the box and hence reduced costs for transport and logistics. Adjoining articles in a nested arrangement have a complementary shape, i.e. the head of an article is adjacent to the bottom of another article and vice versa.
However, a nested arrangement is not easy to obtain especially with large production volumes. There are efficient known transport systems capable of forming two parallel rows of articles in which the articles of a row are turned by 180 degrees with respect to articles of the adjacent row, delivering batches of articles that are substantially arranged in a 2×N matrix, formed by a row of upright articles and a row of overturned articles. However, such systems are not able to operate the nesting within the single rows.
As of date, the nested arrangement is costly and difficult to obtain. The known systems in particular are not satisfactory in fields such as that of coffee capsules where the cartoning machine should handle a large number of articles of small dimensions, with a high speed and the need of high flexibility to operate with different formats. Another problem lies in the need of producing boxes with layers (also referred to as levels) of articles in which the articles are alternated in a complementary manner between one layer and the other. For example in the coffee capsules packaging industry it is desirable that the sealing of a capsule always be in contact with the sealing of a capsule of an overlaying layer to avoid damage of the sealing itself. Thus, formats with several levels of capsule require the creation of complementary layers or levels of capsules.